New on the Piety of Yore

Sergius (Sergii) of Radonezh (d. 1391) has stood as Russia's most important national saint and a savior of the country for about 600 years. Iosif Volotskii (1439/40-1515) is recognized as Russia's most incisive and influential theologian, defender of Orthodoxy, and overall ideologist from the time of the country's emergence as a fully independent, regional great power. The books under review here, each at least 20 years in the making, reveal the continued interest in and vitality of current research into Russia's late medieval and early modern religious life.¹ Miller's prizewinning monograph concerns the development, social history, and long-recognized, singular public role of the Troitse-Sergiev (Trinity-St. Sergius) Monastery and the cult of its celebrated founder, St. Sergius of Radonezh, over a period of almost 300 years.² Alekseev's is a contextual study of Iosif Volotskii's life, writings, and veneration, followed by some minute textology of his major work—the first of its kind in Russia—the Book against the Heretics, or Prosvetitel´, as it came to be known. Almost completely ignoring the former Soviet-Marxist emphasis on large monasteries as "feudal" seigneuries,³ Miller credits and builds on two key predecessors: Boris Kloss for the analysis of the convoy of Sergii's vitae and Pierre Gonneau for the history of the monastery itself up to 1533.⁴ Alekseev, in contrast, plunges the reader into scholarly controversy and boldly attempts a more fundamental revision of Iakov S. Lur´e's earlier analysis and Andrei Pliguzov's attempted modifications of the dating of and interrelationships among Iosif's works.⁵ Miller's book fills an important historiographic gap and is now the standard work in English on Trinity's first centuries. Alekseev's represents the first serious attempt to restore a Jewish content to the so-called "Judaizers" since Lur´e's debunking of almost 470 years of received wisdom, following Archbishop Gennadii's initial characterization of these "Jewish-reasoning Novgorod Heretics" in 1487. Both books will be useful as prologomena to further related studies.

Miller's overall goal is to grasp the social essence of Trinity as a community writ large, the significance of the cult of the founder, and the role of cult and cloister in the development of Russia's national consciousness. Attempting to strip "accretions of legend" (12) to the hypothetical, pure Epifanii Premudryi vita of Sergii (composed in 1418, but not extant as such) from the edits and augments by Pakhomii the Serb (1430s and 1440s), the author is most convincing concerning Sergii's conciliating actions relative to princely quarrels. Addressing the celebrated coenobitic reform, which the hagiography claims was mandated by the patriarch and instituted by Sergii and then became a model for new foundations, Miller does not probe how fully communal these measures were. Some monks certainly owned their own books, as they later would in the more strictly regulated Iosifov-Volokolamsk Monastery. Perhaps, only the common daily liturgies and meals figured in this reform. Nor is it true, pace Miller, that Metropolitan Aleksei (r. 1358-78) promoted the Sabaite or "Jerusalem" Typicon (28), which is still in use today but seems to have been adopted in Russia gradually in the 15th century. Nonetheless, treating recognized sainthood as a posthumous social transaction, Miller properly assigns a central role to Sergii's second successor, Nikon (r. 1395-1427), and to the accretions of miracles in the hesychastic-minded Pakhomii's several rewrites of Epifanii's original, which become historical markers for the reframing of Sergii's sanctity. He soon became a hero of Kulikovo (Dmitrii Donskoi's mythologized 1380 victory over the Tatar emir Mamai, followed in 1382 by...